Online Practitioner Training in Behavioral Intervention in Autism: Skill Training Using an Interactive Simulated Child - Project Summary
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurological disorder that typically appears before the age of
three and immediately and profoundly affects a young child's ability to communicate, develop language, form
social relationships and respond appropriately to environmental cues. Behavioral intervention is a consensus
"best practice" scientific treatment methodology derived from the field of Applied Behavior Analysis, that
focuses on providing rigorous and sustained one-to-one and natural-context treatment to teach developmental
skills such as attending, imitation, receptive language, expressive language, pre-academic social and self-help
skills. BI-based teaching interventions are highly structured, and they typically employ a number of procedures
to begin teaching critical developmental prerequisite skills related to language, motor and discrimination
training. These include Discrete-Trial Training, Shaping, Fading, Chaining, Differential Reinforcement, and
other methodologies, all used by practitioners to foster learning. This project will develop a simulated
interactive virtual child as a teaching tool for teachers and practitioners who are learning complex behavioral
training procedures. For this Phase-1 project we will focus our effort on teaching “Discrete-Trial Training,” as a
means of testing the feasibility of the product, in preparation for a Phase-II submission. The project has two
major objectives: (1) to design and develop a prototype of the product and (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of
the prototype.
